"The birth of the Czech creative film poster phenomenon in the early sixties can be credited to Karel Vaca, Karel Teissig, Richard Fremund, Vladimir Tesar, Jiri Balcar, Jaroslav Fiser, Zdenek Ziegler, Milan Grygar, Bedrich Dlouhy, Zdenek Palcr and others. In the late sixties and during the seventies they were joined by Josef Vyletal, Olga Polackova–Vyletalova, Jiri Rathousky, Alexej Jaros, Karel Machalek, Petr Pos, Jiri Salamoun, Vratislav Hlavaty, Zdenek Vlach and Antonin Sladek. In the streets, but soon also at film festival exhibitions, in art galleries and cinema premises, Czech film poster rapidly won the favor of the public for its creative imagination, poetic and lyrical atmosphere. It was characteristic by the use of collage, rollage, photomontage, retouching, striking graphic designs, wity typographic visual puns and surrealist dreamy interpretation. Mass reproductions of works of art flooded the billboards in towns and cities and changed them into sidewalk open air galleries. In the course of the 1960s, Czech film poster designers found inspiration in the informal style, applying its forms of structural abstraction and lettrism, later on in pop–art and op–art, using the then popular psychedelic forms and colors. Artists frequently employed styles inspired by the film forms, such as enlarged close–up, merging of symbolic and metaphoric visual levels and repeated details."

CONTRIBUTOR

SHARE

"This composition comprises the flat, featureless and strongly linear below–ground buildings of Metropolis' workers city, transformed and transposed into a mass of soaring, above–ground skyscrapers, huddled together and rather chaotically intersected by aerial roads and walkways. This interpretation of Fritz Lang's urban vision, as opposed to a mere reproduction of images from the film, makes a stunning poster. The strongly linear elements of Bilinsky's cityscape contrasts with the circular Tower of Babel and other soft–edged constructions which exist in Joh Fredersen's above–ground city for the rich and privileged. This poster has been reproduced in a number of publications dealing with European film posters, posters in general, and art movements of the 1920s. Bilinsky's work presents an artisitc bridge between Russian constructivism with is hard edges and linearity, and the soft, romantic elements so much a part of the French tradition."

Many people now know the story of the uncovered and disused ex–lift passageways in Notting Hill Gate tube station that LU workers rediscovered in 2010 after 50 years of being sealed up. ...

This view looks towards where the stairs down to the lifts would have been and shows the original 1900 tiled finishes along with a wall of posters, the Victor Galbraith 'Party Travel' poster, with an elephant, issued by London Transport itself being prominent.

The posters and passageways have, after much thought, been re–entombed and are again inaccessible so please don't pester the station staff"

CONTRIBUTOR

SHARE

"Painter, photographer, filmmaker, set designer, teacher, metalworker, [Alexander Rodchenko] revelled in the new freedoms thrown up by the Russian Revolution and was fiercely committed to liberating art for the masses.

Whether it was his blueprint for the ideal working man's club showcased at the Paris Exhibition of 1925, his illustrated covers for engineering manuals or his pioneering film poster for Sergei Eisenstein's classic Battleship Potemkin, Rodchenko's experimentation embodied the spirit of the early Soviet era.

But just as he thrived in the intellectual ferment of the Lenin years, like so many other artists–cum–revolutionaries of the period he was to fall foul of Stalin's increasingly paranoid and brutal regime.

Today his influence lives on, not only inspiring modern–day photographers like Martin Parr, but his designs are perhaps best known for the art school chic they afford to the covers of records by the Scottish indie band Franz Ferdinand."